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Sweetbread Patties

Sweetbread patties are made from sweetbreads and mushrooms in a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Sweetbread Patties

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak sweetbreads in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Parboil sweetbreads for 15 minutes, adding salt 5 minutes before done.

  3. Cool sweetbreads in cold water for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove tough portions from sweetbreads and cut sweetbreads into small pieces.

  5. Chop mushrooms finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan and add flour to the melted butter.

  2. Season the mixture with white pepper and cayenne pepper.

  3. Add cream to the mixture.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine sweetbreads and mushrooms with the sauce and heat the mixture.

  2. Serve in patty dishes or timbales.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the patties.
Butter
Carries the flour and forms the fat base of the sauce, adding richness.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce that binds the filling.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the sauce a soft, creamy texture.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the cream to the roux. Flour thickens liquid only when it is cooked in fat and then mixed smoothly with the liquid. Adding cream too quickly or unevenly can leave lumps, so stir steadily while the sauce thickens.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, flour, cream, mushroom):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, flour, cream, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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